Skin and Bones
by viataco
Summary: Otto Octavius succumbs. (Movieverse). A work in progress.
1. 0 prickle

0 (prickle)

"This water's been sitting here for days," she says. "Can I use it?"

Otto looks up and blinks at her. "Sure, sure," he says, after a beat. He just drank out of that glass ten minutes ago, but now that he thinks about it, he realizes it was there when he walked into his workroom this morning. He tends toward tunnel-vision when he's working, and the workroom has played host to a number of fuzzy, green-tinged dishes. Rosie calls them _science projects_, and Otto has never been able to tell whether she's being ironic or not.

She takes the glass of water and carries it to the window opposite Otto's desk. Dipping her first two fingers in it, she wrinkles her nose, and waters the little garden she keeps in the rhombus of afternoon sunlight that falls over the sill. Flicking her fingers, she does it a drop at a time.

Rosie doesn't like roses; that was the first thing Otto learned about her, the first time he took her out. She grinned all the same when he presented them from behind his back (a cliché clipped out of every movie he had ever seen; not something he'd ever had a chance to do in practice) cocked to the side so that she could take them up in her arms, cradle them the way girls did in the movies, like a baby, like their lover's head. Instead she grabbed them right by the stems – luckily they were thornless, stripped by the florist for an extra dollar – her grip firm, and nodded graciously, excusing herself to find a vase. Her roommate, a weedy girl in Lennon glasses and a peasant blouse that surely had never been near an actual peasant, twisted in her chair to watch Rosie into the little hole of a kitchen, smirking.

"Don't bring her roses again," she said, shaking her head at Otto like he was a naughty child. "She's not really into that. She's into, like, cactuses." She rolled her eyes, an indictment of Rosie's taste. Otto looked past the roommate, whose name he can't remember now, twenty-five years later, and watched Rosie through the kitchen doorway. She was arranging the roses in a voluptuous and uneven ceramic vase with more care than they deserved, spreading them and nudging them into place with her fingertips. She cupped a droopy, half-open bud in the palm of her hand, tilting her head at it with a faint, faint smile, and Otto's heart beat a little faster. But for some reason, all he could think was that surely Rosie knew the plural of _cactus_ was _cacti_.

A sprinkle for each squat, hostile little cactus, enough to keep them alive for weeks. Otto used to find her love of cacti incongruous, back when he still thought of her as delicate, as petal-skinned and airy. He has since learned how much sense it makes, Rosie and the cactus; both are hardy, self-sufficient, a little on the short side, dangerous when rubbed the wrong way. Both do well with a minimum of attention – something Otto has long since stopped feeling guilty about. Rosie and the cactus probably make more sense than Rosie and him, he reflects, and turn back to his notes, the silvery sound of her fingernails on the water glass still chiming from across the room.

When he looks up again, there is a new, full glass beside him, beveled with condensation and leaving a ring on his desk. Rosie is standing beside it, a foot to the left so she's not in his light, tilting her head at the same fond angle she did for that sleepy little rose.

"Thank you," he says, indicating the fresh water. "I'd have gotten it myself after a while, you know." She smiles and bends forward to lean her elbows on the desk, propping her chin in her hands.

"No you wouldn't," she scolds, raising her eyebrows. "If I didn't take care of you, who would?"

Propriety like this used to raise his hackles, but he can admit now that she's right. He'd been drinking from the same glass for three days, after all.

She cups his face in one hand, gently. "Prickly," she says, running her thumb over his chin, which was last shaven about forty-eight hours ago, and only cursorily at that. "I've a sudden urge to water you."

"Already have," he says, grinning and taking a sip from his glass.

She kisses him, a hot shock after the cold water.

This is why Rosie does not like roses, she says: they're too delicate. They wilt. Their scent is cloying, saccharine. (Her words.) They remind her of old money, pretension, institution. Outmoded feminine ideals. (Her phrase.)

Worst of all, though, they're needy and temperamental, hard to satisfy, thirsty for attention, always wanting more.

Like Rosie's kiss, rather. The asymmetry is jarring, to a physicist. Then again, Otto is a believer in chaos, and always has been.

Her kiss is chaos. Hungry energy, wild-dancing tongue, heat out of nothing. He kisses back, he kisses back, he kisses back. They are unbreakable, fused together at their shared, sweltering mouths.

His hand comes up, inkstained, to tangle in her hair, and she is –


	2. 3 are

3 (are)

_She is dead._

_She is dead_, they're hissing, inside his head. _We are all you have left. We are all you have. We are all._

"You are," he murmurs, one of them slipping gracefully past his cheek to rifle through the reams and reams of notes and schematics he's rewritten from memory. "You are all, you are."

He finds it easier to let them do the thinking, now: them, the new, the better pieces of himself, the actuators, the tentacles.

"_We are all you are_," they tell him, and this gives him pause.

"You are me," he mutters. "And I am you, and we are each other, but –" he is tired, exhausted, and almost gives up trying to say what he means, but the right words eventually occur to him: "But I was here before you, and you are not all I am."

_She is dead,_ they say again, reading his mind. And that's what they were built for, after all.


	3. 1 dirty

1 (dirty)

He does not wake in a cold sweat.

That first morning, he wakes in a hot, sour, city-summer sweat, aching everywhere. The actuators are restless, shifting and sliding like a nest of snakes.

There is a moment when he doesn't remember what he's doing here, why he's dirty and raw-throated and sleeping across a line of metal bolts. He sits up, he blinks. It's still dark and there is the hushed, secretive sound of water, around him, beneath him, like the same word whispered over and over. There is the smell of old motor oil, dead fish.

When he does remember, he makes a sound that echoes around the warehouse; a throaty, desperate gasp, a sob in reverse, as if he can draw all of this horror back inside himself, suck it in and keep it there and let the world go on as it was.

Still, the smell of old industry and dirty shore. Still the kink in his spine. There is no going back. He is up Einstein's river without a paddle, or indeed the ability to swim. _There is nowhere to go but forward_, the actuators tell him, and he starts at the intrusion. They are still a stranger inside his head.

A factory whistle blows, down the shore. The tentacles rear and lift him from his warm spot on the floor. He shakes his head, scrubs his eyes, and lets them set him to work.

He mutters to himself as they pace him the length of the warehouse. The things he'll need. Money, scrap metal. Favors he'll need to call in. The actuators give showy, menacing snaps, but he dismisses the idea of violence. _We were made to help you_, they cajole. _Let us help you, let us help you, let us_ -

Suddenly they arch, seem to bristle like wary cats, and swivel to face the heavy, stuck-open door.

There's a woman there, silhouetted against dawn, and in the moment before the cameras screw up their irises against the harsh light, she is an empty shape – she could be anyone. Her arms are outstretched, her head thrown back.

"Rosie?" he whispers, standing up. The scraps of paper on his lap scatter and eddy to the floor.

"What?" the woman-shape says, and he can see now that she's just all wrong, all wrong. She's blonde, she's dirty, her cheeks are sunken in. She's in a big gray thrift dress; her skin is old but her eyes are young.

"What?" Otto repeats stupidly.

"We – we live here," she says, her eyes big, her mouth hanging open, bovine, shocked. She flinches back when the actuators retract behind him, hiding themselves as well as they can.

"We lived here," another voice says, and the woman's silhouette divides into two. She has a little girl with her, also dirty, blonde, dirty-blonde. Rag-thin and tired-looking. Her eyes are big, too, but not with fear. "Do you live here now?"

Her mother pulls her back by her sleeve, stepping in front of her. She whispers something down to her, and the little girl dutifully backs away, cutting herself from view behind the loading door. Otto is at a loss.

_Make them go away,_ the actuators hiss, impatiently. _Make them go. MAKE THEM GO._

"You should go," Otto says tremulously. "I'm sorry, but –"

The woman steps forward, her chin out, her feet planted far apart, and lifts her dress over one leg, flashing a curl of pubic hair. She holds it there, clearly offering more. Otto blinks twice and puts out a hand, as if to wave her away, _no, no._

The little girl peeks around the door at her mother. She doesn't flinch at what she sees.

_MAKE THEM GO._ The tentacles bloom around him, menacing, poised. He willfully, forcibly, holds them back.

"I'm sorry," he says, ragged panic in his voice. "But you have to go."

The little girl reaches out and tugs hard, urgent, at the hem of her mother's dress. Her mother turns and shoos her out, quickly, looking back over her shoulder, gone in a morning-gray billow of skirts.

The actuators curl and sink around him, satisfied.


	4. 4 bones

4 (bones)

He works with a scattered, feverish intensity, doing many things at once, the workstation that he has built for himself - that they have built for him – spread over with papers, littered with tools. Rosie always used to say he needed another pair of hands, and now he has two of them: constantly shifting, snaking, twining around him like lovers. But they're too cold, too sleek, to love.

They carry him; he does not walk. They carry him from his broken-nest makeshift bed to his scattershot workstation, to the hulking skeleton of the half-built reactor, which sits cold and curled around itself, like a spider dead on its back.

They wake up of their own accord in the inksmudge-gray chill before dawn; he wakes to his bad back and sore joints being peeled out of bed, the warmth of sleep dissipating off them, the unwashed flesh-smelling covers falling away. They pull him, half-awake, to his work. He coaxes them to bed at night, or in the bleak of dawn, or after he's been up so long he can't tell what time of day it is anymore, and they whisper, _it isn't finished. We are not finished. You must finish. You must._

"Yes," he says. "Yes." Sometimes he is angry, petulant like an exhausted child, telling them he can't, he can't finish without rest. He screams at them, and they rear back, open their claws and train their harsh unblinking eyes on him, defensive. He screams until he is hoarse and they listen, hissing mechanically, and say, _You must. For us. You must._

Sometimes he is too exhausted to put up a fight. He hangs his unshaven (p_rickly_) sleepy head, hangs in their senseless metal parody of an embrace (a_ sudden urge_), nodding and startling awake, and lets them use him. They drag him around, an appendage himself, a vestigial outcropping of flesh. They were built, after all, to make him obsolete.

He wonders if this will be the end of him. He wonders if they will work him to death. He imagines his corpse hanging off of them, only marginally more useless than he is now. He imagines them satisfied, no longer beholden to the fickleness of his flesh, his many inconvenient needs. His body would decay away, a relief, a release, drooping and withering like an old bouquet. No one there to cradle his spent-sagging face, no half-smile to start his heart again, he would rot down to his core, steel and bones, a skeleton dragged through its paces, emptily haunting his life's work.

He imagines them shaking loose his bones, scattering them to the stray wharf-dogs, and scuttling triumphantly away, reborn.


	5. 4 flesh

4 (flesh)

He dreams of Rosie, Rosie in the days before he killed her.

Rosie in their kitchen, quietly making tea.

Rosie passing by him, absently, a whiff of incense, a jangle of earrings, a billow of skirts, turning the corner and gone

Rosie humming to herself, leafing through a book with pin-delicate fingers, ginger and careful, loving.

Rosie's mouth hot-open, her head thrown back, her whole body tense and arching as if electrified. Rosie's soft supple shoulder, sinew and skin, giving just enough between his teeth. Rosie pulling at him, wrapping and locking her legs around his desperate hips, his cock aching, aching inside her, his mouth hungry, his hands fisting her hair, fisting the sheets.

Rosie not a rose, Rosie a twisting, writhing, wild thing. Rosie magnetic, Rosie drawing him in. The slide of her hands, the heat of her breath, the give of her thighs, the half-bruised resilience of her flesh. The self-sustaining energy between him and her, the electricity over their skin.

Rosie. Rosie, Rosie.

He does not wake in a cold sweat.


End file.
